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ABOUT US

Chances are the only people reading this are related to us or practically related to us, which renders this “About Us” page useless. However, for our posterity and the occasional non-relative, this is our story:

We are Troy Leland and Lindsay Allen Shields and our story begins with our births, in the blissful year of 1989–Troy in San Diego, CA and Lindsay in Holland, MI. Needless to say, both of our families were overjoyed. Stop worrying–we’ll skip the borfascinating details of our childhood and jump to October 2010. Troy just, and I mean just, returned from his LDS mission in Albania and immediately drove off to see his sister married in Salt Lake City, UT. In the meantime, Lindsay was hiding out in her room with her roommate, Stacy, spying on the neighbor boys through her window. As fate would have it, these neighbor boys also happened to be the residents of Grannies, made up of Troy’s BFFs/cousins, whom he was on his way to see. Because as happy as he was to see his sister married, Troy was even more excited to embrace and dance with the cousins to Daft Punk. Shortly after his arrival, Grannies was bumpin’ in celebration and he was scanning the room for his first hook-up, when who should walk in but a mysterious soccer player named Lauren dressed in pajama shorts, tube-socks, and no shoes. He approached her, they spoke, and she shortly left. He didn’t score that night but their great, albeit short, conversation would keep his mind thinking of her for the next month. (He would later learn on their next encounter that Lauren is one and the same to his very non-mysterious neighbor Lindsay Allen, who couldn’t remember the last time she touched a soccer ball.) Lindsay waltzed home with Stacy that night and gave Troy the cute-stamp-of-approval which led Stacy to immediately predict her romantic future, which was as follows:

Troy would come back, eventually move into Grannies, and they would begin to casually date.

After several months of this, Lindsay would decide she was over the casual thing after living so long in Provo and want to be attached.

Troy would decide that he was over the attached thing being so fresh off his mission.

They would part ways.

Troy would test the waters for a while and Lindsay would move on to an even funnier, real man.

He would find no girl could hold a candle to the non-soccer-playing Lauren/Lindsay and she would find there is no such thing as a real man in Provo (and especially no one as funny).

Being neighbors and in the same group of friends, they would start to hang out again.

They would seriously date.

They would get engaged.

They would get married.

And lo and behold, in April of 2012…

…. Stacy was right, every step of the way.

And we’re glad she was! Since then we’ve had a lot of fun being married and have had some great adventures together, but until now they’ve only been distance memories. SHLDZ is a place we’ve built (and by we I mostly mean Troy) to document the important and not-so-important facets of our lives. That way when we’re off making millions in Japan for a couple years or we’re too old to remember each others names, our family can keep up and look back at what we’re up to and share in the memories we’ve made.